John Humphrey Noyes and George Fox: Religious Visionaries

Abstract

George Fox and John Humphrey Noyes were visionaries who founded Christian movements in seventeenth-century England and nineteenthcentury America, respectively. Yet while the Quaker movement founded by Fox in 1647 had an estimated 50,000 members by 1660 and remains a vital denomination today, the Oneida Community founded by Noyes in 1848 never had more than 300 members and disbanded in 1881, eight years before Noyes’s death. Why was Fox’s achievement so much more enduring than Noyes’s? Certainly part of the answer lies in the highly radical nature of Noyes’s vision. But another reason was their effectiveness as leaders. And while the difference in their effectiveness involved all of the elements in our framework, it was rooted in the relative selflessness or selfishness of their visions.